HEALTH: Cuban Medical Team Forced to Return Home from Honduras

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Oct 1 1999 (IPS) - A team of Cuban health practitioners providing assistance to remote villages in Honduras in the wake of hurricane Mitch was forced to return home, just as the impoverished Central American country was swept by yet another natural disaster.

The 107 doctors and other health personnel returned to Cuba Thursday in the same plane in which 32 epidemiologists, pediatricians, gynecologists, orthopedic experts and nurses flew to Honduras in response to a new appeal by the government for assistance in the face of severe flooding in the past few weeks.

The team of 107 health practitioners was forced to return home by the Honduran Medical Association, which set a Sep 30 deadline for the conclusion of their assistance mission. The governments of Cuba and Honduras were on the verge of signing an agreement that would have allowed the volunteers to stay.

‘Granma’, the publication of Cuba’s governing Communist Party, reported Friday that the team treated 800,000 Hondurans and carried out 10,000 surgical operations, 500 of which were highly complex.

Split into groups and transported in truck beds or boats or simply hiking into rural communities, the members of the team visited 1,300 remote villages lacking health services.

“We beg the president [Honduran President Carlos Flores] to do something to allow these doctors to return to Olancho,” said Samuel García, mayor of Juticalpa in the department of Olancho, 220 kms east of the capital of Honduras.

Honduras was hit hardest by hurricane Mitch, which swept through Central America in late October 1998, causing billions of dollars in damages and claiming at least 9,000 lives.

The Cuban government’s medical assistance programme responded to emergency needs resulting from hurricanes Mitch and Georges in a number of Central American and Caribbean nations last year, including Honduras, Nicaragua, Belize, Guatemala and Haiti.

Cuba has sent health practitioners to other regions as well, and as of August, some 1,600 medical personnel were working as volunteers in Central America, the Caribbean and Africa. The medical assistance programme involves the training of local health services staff as well.

Addressing the rally held to receive the returning medical team, President Fidel Castro pointed out that “our doctors do not compete with anyone” – a reference to the “unjustified jealousy that unfortunately emerged” in Honduras, caused by “supposed and imaginary conflicts of interests.”

The medical team was forced to return to Cuba by complaints by the Honduran Medical Association, which “insisted that there was competition, and that their interests were affected,” said Castro.

He pointed out, however, that the brigade was not working in large cities, but went instead to “the most remote places, many of which have never been visited by a physician, or which are visited every six months.

“Our doctors were working without limitations on their schedules, as many hours as necessary, in places where they could not compete with anyone,” he stressed.

But despite the resistance from the Honduran Medical Association, doctors in the Central American country expressed their gratitude to the Cuban team, Castro added.

The Honduran Medical Association suggested that medical teams from Cuba work in three-month shifts, a condition Cuba rejected due to the need for the health practitioners to become familiar with the situation on the ground, which differs enormously from conditions in Cuba.

The teams sent to Central America have had to deal with illnesses that have been virtually eradicated in Cuba, such as malaria.

Cuba not only sends medical brigades abroad, but also provides training at home. As part of its medical assistance plan, the Castro administration inaugurated the Latin American School of Medical Sciences, where some 2,000 students from 18 countries are presently being taught.

An additional 6,000 scholarships are to be extended to students from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Castro pointed out that one year of medical school costs around 30,000 in most countries. In reference to the problem of the flight of professionals from developing countries, he added that Cuba would not “steal one single brain” of all those trained on the island, as occurs in other countries.

Official data on the cost of a doctor’s education in Cuba is not available, but economists consulted by IPS estimated the cost up to graduation at around 14,000 dollars.

The comparatively low cost is based on the salaries received by health professionals and medical school faculty in Cuba, as well as the fact that students begin working in hospitals, without pay, early on in the course of their studies.

Cuba has more than 65,000 medical doctors, one for every 169 inhabitants. Public health services are available in the most remote corners of the island, and nearly the entire population is covered by a system of primary attention known as the “family doctor.”

A resolution adopted by the Ministry of Public Health this year regulated departures of health practitioners. Around 7,000 Cuban doctors are estimated to have settled abroad in the past nine years, far more than the 3,000 who went into exile between Jan 1, 1959 – when Castro’s revolution triumphed – and 1990, when the ongoing economic crisis broke out.